“The Northern Sea Route and Local Communities in Northwest Russia: Social
Impact Assessment for the Murmansk Region”

By Yulian Konstantinov, New Bulgarian University, Sofia, Bulgaria.

Murmansk Region is the most urbanized administrative area in the Russian Far
North and also an area with a very sizeable presence of the military-industrial
complex (VPK). The local communities whose livelihood is based mainly on
reindeer-herding and fishing are only about 8% of the total of 1,250,000 people. As
this tundra-connected population has been concentrated mainly in the inland,
central part of the Kola Peninsula (Lovozersky Rayon), NSR expansion may be
expected not to affect them directly, but mainly insofar as it has a bearing on
current processes in the urban and VPK communities.

NSR expansion may be expected to alleviate the currently very critical
situation of a stranded urban population - labour migrants from the South who are
unemployed, but have no place to go back to. Participation of the VPK in the
project may help improve its own state. As poaching-pressure on renewable resources
in the Region comes primarily from these two major actors, alleviation of the
crisis in their sectors, combined with new economic means for increased control,
will with certainty contribute towards saving the resource-base of the
tundra-connected local population.

The concept of tundra-connected local population is discussed in detail in the
paper. Due to historical and demographic reasons it has come to include not
only the indigenous Sami people, but also other groups: those of the Komi,
Nenets, and Pomor communities. The area of concern for the local population must be
expanded beyond the confines of a strictly indigenous status.

The main recommendation of the paper is that NSR expansion must not disrupt
the traditional resource-base of the local groups by taking industrial, mining,
or infrastructural projects into the main reindeer-herding area,
administratively comprised by Lovozersky Rayon, i.e. east of the Murmansk-St. Petersburg
railway-line. It is strongly suggested that the Rayon should be helped to acquire
the status of a protected reindeer-herding and wild-nature zone, with
infrastructural (transport) problems being solved by improved air transport. Furthermore
it is emphasized that the ecological safety of the Region as well as of
territories far beyond its boundaries critically depends on solving existing problems
of storage and processing of high concentrations of nuclear waste which may be
expected to increase with nuclear-powered ice-breaker additions and projected
conversion activities.